Contesting or Affirming ‘Europe’? European Enlargement, Aspirations for ‘Europeanness’ and New Identities in the Margins of Europe

Contrary to the expectations of the advocates of the EU project, an expanded and integrated Europe has so far not resulted in an inclusive cosmopolitanism of Europe in its actually existing complexity and heterogeneity. The enlargement of Europe in recent decades, instead of contesting Europe and expanding it to include all of actually existing Europe, has rather gone in the direction of confirming a monolithic conception of ‘Europe’, as culturally and politically defined by Western Europe, and one that properly belongs to a white bourgeois class able to function in a transnational, neoliberal space. This has led to a hyper-consciousness, new or heightened anxieties about ‘Europeanness’ based on distinctions between East and West, North and South. The paper focuses on the implications of, aspirations for, and insecure belonging in Europeanness in countries and regions in the margins of Europe. It argues that one of the most important outcomes of a heightened narcissism around European identity in the post-Cold War period has been an ongoing expansion, as well as reconfiguration, of exclusionary racist and culturalist logics across Europe. In the margins of Europe, these have been especially destructive, in terms of turning countries, regions and ethnic groups against one another as well as causing (racialized) class divisions and tensions.